September 16, 2010

Cartoonist in Hiding After Death Threats

The New York Times

A cartoonist in Seattle who promoted an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” last spring is now in hiding after her life was threatened by Islamic extremists.

The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has changed her name and has stopped producing work for a local alternative newspaper, Seattle Weekly, according to the newspaper’s editor, Mark D. Fefer.

Mr. Fefer declined an interview request Thursday, citing “the sensitivity of the situation.” But in a letter to readers about Ms. Norris on Wednesday, he said that “on the insistence of top security specialists at the F.B.I., she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.”

The F.B.I. declined to comment on the case.

Ms. Norris attracted attention after she published a poster on the Internet in April satirically proposing that people draw figures of the Prophet Muhammad on May 20.

She indicated that the proposal was a protest of censorship by Comedy Central, which edited out references to Muhammad from an episode of “South Park” that month. That episode also triggered threats from extremists. Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

In 2005, a Danish cartoonist named Kurt Westergaard published a depiction of Muhammad that led to multiple death threats and alleged assassination attempts. He was presented an award this month for freedom of speech by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The poster by Ms. Norris spread on the Internet and spawned Facebook groups both for and against the idea. She quickly tried to tamp down the controversy, apologizing to Muslims and at one point joking that the event should be renamed “Everybody Draw Al Gore Day.” The protest movement continued in the spring largely without her involvement.

In July, Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American cleric who is accused of ties to Al Qaeda, said in a document published on the Internet that Ms. Norris “should be taken as a prime target of assassination,” according to the NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites, which translated the document.

Mr. Awlaki stated that Ms. Norris and other unnamed people in the United States and Europe “are expressing their hatred of the Messenger of Islam through ridicule.” In a controversial step, the Obama administration this year authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Mr. Awlaki, who is in hiding.

Seattle Weekly started to publish cartoons by Ms. Norris about two months ago. Her last cartoon appeared in the Sept. 8 issue.

Ms. Norris did not respond to e-mail messages on Thursday. Her personal Web site has been taken offline.

Michael Cavna, a writer for Comic Riffs, a Washington Post blog about comics, said that he contacted her on Thursday and that she verified Mr. Fefer’s version of events.

Mr. Fefer wrote that Ms. Norris had likened her situation “to cancer — it might basically be nothing, it might be urgent and serious, it might go away and never return, or it might pop up again when she least expects it.”

On the one hand you've got the tradition that Muhammed should never be seen (the aliens on The Greatest American Hero might be a good example as to why). On the other hand, you've got a bunch of lowlifes being given license to issue death threats to whoever they want for whatever stupid little reason (if nobody drew Muhammed, they'd think of something else). I'm sure Weemie thinks the answer is just to "kill them all," and if I thought that were in any way possible I might agree.

Still, to get a threat from someone on the CIA's hit list, for realsies, that's gotta be seriously unnerving.

Just noticed this thread.

The fact that Allen takes it as a given that someone he knows nothing about would immediately take a "kill them all" approach to the Molly Norris situation says a great deal about Allen. Projecting much?

We're still at war, you know. If Major Hassan, Faisal Shazad, Abdulmuttallab and the printer toner bombs from Yemen aren't convincing you, then I doubt Molly Norris' de facto prisoner-of-war status will make a difference. She pissed off the enemy, too bad, so sad. Blame Bush, whine about losing an election, and move on.

Seriously, in a 'would you share a foxhole with this guy?' sense, why on earth should the American people have any interest in what your side has to say about Molly Norris? If restoring her freedom to walk around unescorted and to talk or write or draw as she chooses would keep Gitmo open a single day longer, would you do it? Your answer and what it implies should tell you something about yourself.

After all, Gitmo ain't going to close any time soon, despite the fact that for two and four years we've had a President and Congress devoted to closing it ASAP. Obama promised to close it within one year of his inauguration, and gave us a snapshot of his Presidency right there. So I'm waiting for the first flush of lefty realizations that imprisoning America's enemies for life without trial is a great idea, and Rush Limbaugh or whatever boogieman is keeping the left awake at night should be sent there post haste. It's the next logical step. "Americans are ignorant and irrational and usually racist and they still support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, so let's start shipping the real Enemies of the People there."

It's only the charade of Darth Cheney's War on Terror that keeps the pretense up, right? That's why Chimpy McHitlerburton stole the election and fire melted steel for the first time in history, right, and that's when the Muslim world first started to hate us. Molly Norris is just another victim of the evil GOP, pardon the redundancy.

Like the Congress that recently renewed the Patriot Act and the President who takes full use of wiretaps, powers of rendition, state secrets, executive priviledge, unelected czars, Predator missles and mobilization of the US military in half-a-dozen Muslim countries that his predecessor did, some Americans realize we're at war, and act like it.

Can you name anybody on your side who actually understands the stakes of the war and is upfront with you about fighting it, in the 'take a bullet for this guy' sense? Me neither. I hope Molly Norris is the last victim on this front, but I'm not optimistic.

I doubt that very seriously.



Am I?

You consistently fail to properly elicit your positions (so as to give yourself room to back-pedal, presumably), so that's not a rhetorical question.

I'm not quite sure what you are saying here. Who's "your side"?
The latter part seems to be a silly hypothetical, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

That's what I'm saying about Weemie and his non-positions. What's the correlary between Molly Norris and Gitmo? He said something once about himself being the only person who could connect these kinds of things. And I believe that.

Again with the projection.

Listen nimrod, what makes you think I'm ATTEMPTING to elucidate my positions in the first place? In the "would you share a foxhole with this guy?" sense, giving your position to the enemy is a bad thing, and you can choose your targets more carefully if they don't know where you're shooting from.

Furthermore, Mr. “I’m going to live up to all the negative stereotypes of an 11 Bravo”, drawing connections between seemingly-disparate events is how intelligence is collected, how logistics are handled, how leadership is conducted, how new ideas and tools and weapons, strategies, devices and inventions are brought into existence. From a Forward Operating Base to an issue of your favorite comic books, there’s an immense network of creativity, ingenuity and effort required to draw connections into a sustained pattern. That’s what progress is. That’s also what freedom depends on.

Thank you for providing a living example of what I was talking about. Rather than wrap your brain around the concept that you might not understand the issues at stake. Since we are at war, and the potential for mass death is very high, I thought I was giving you the benefit of the doubt by saying it was “projection” that led you to assume someone you know nothing about is automatically of the “kill ‘em all” belief. Because you are willing to shrug off the deaths of complete strangers, you assume that others are of the same mindset. You even admitted it was only the question of how that kept you from agreeing with the viewpoint you falsely attributed to someone else.

That’s why you lost the election, that’s why you’re so disappointed that Obama is too centrist, that’s why Gitmo is staying open, because you (and all of those out there who agree with you) are so utterly completely given over to presuming things that you know absolutely nothing about. And you ignore it when it’s pointed out to you repeatedly. It’s like you’re wired that way, and I shudder to think of what your motivation for doing this would be if it wasn’t “projection”.

So, no, I’m not FAILING to disclose my position. If you had something other than your own primitive stereotypes to help you understand people who think differently, you might understand why.

Well, yeah, but you can’t just throw out any two issues and imply they have much to say about each other. You have to actually make some kind of argument to demonstrate the relationship you claim exists. You haven't done that; apparently because you're afraid of giving away your position in the foxhole, or something.

Thanks for the George Orwell quote, Charles. It's a good one.